(birds chirping)

Hi, I'm Lucy Chamberlain and I'm head gardener

of a private estate in Essex called East Donyland Hall.

I'm also one half of the plant experts

at BBC Gardeners' World Live.

And I'm the other half of the plant experts.

My name is Saul Walker

and I work at Stonelands House in Devon.

(subtle upbeat music)

We're here today at Audley End to meet up

with head gardener Louise and her team

as they show us around the walled garden.

(gravel crunching) (birds chirping)

Thank you.

Wow Saul what an amazing greenhouse this is.

Wow.

Look at the flower.

Look at the color. (Lucy laughs)

Absolutely.

And these hyacinths, they absolutely smell delicious.

Scents in the air isn't it?

Yep.

(birds chirping)

Louise, hello. Lovely to meet you.

I'm Lucy.

Hi. Hi.

Hi, and I'm Saul.

Hello. How are you?

Nice to meet you both.

It's great to see you here

in the kitchen garden at Audley End today.

Oh, it's absolutely beautiful.

We've had a quick look around

as we arrived and it's such a gorgeous place, isn't it?

Yeah, thank you.

(all laugh) Thank you.

It's not all down to me.

We have a garden team

of 12 staff here and lots of volunteers as well that

Wonderful keep it looking like this

And what we're gonna be talking about today

which I'm gonna find fascinating is the,

the history of the garden,

but actually also how you manage the garden

in the modern day as well.

So the contrast of the two

or maybe things that we do the same.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, we're really looking forward

to having a good look around.

Great.

I'll be pleased to show you around.

(subtle upbeat music) (birds chirping)

Okay. So if you want to follow me.

Yeah. Of course.

This is the bothy.

So in, in the back sheds behind the vinery

and I just wanted to show you the bothy where two

of the under gardeners would've lived.

Particularly focused on William Cresswell,

who was a gardener here in the 1870s.

And what's interesting is I can see we've got his diary.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So that's a copy of the diary

but the original diary's in the collection

down at the main house.

We're also really fortunate we've got a second diary

for a gardener called Thomas Challis.

Oh wow.

Who was here in the 1790s.

So Louise, what do you think Challis and Cresswell

would've been doing in about mid April,

(Louise laughs) which is where we are now,

in their gardens in the 1700s and 1800s?

What would be the jobs they'd be doing?

Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting.

There's some very similar jobs to the sorts of jobs

that we're doing at the moment that you may well see today.

So they mention pricking out and potting on tomatoes.

Yep.

They mentioned tying in peaches.

There's also preparation work in the,

in the vegetable plots

sort of getting the soil ready for planting.

So yeah.

Fascinating that we are doing the same sorts

of jobs as them.

Yeah. Hundreds years later.

And we're gonna go and have a look

at your gardeners and yourself doing some of those jobs now.

So you are gonna go have a look

at some tomatoes and we are gonna go

and have a look at some of the old closhes.

Yeah. All right

Great. Let's do it.

(subtle upbeat music) (birds chirping)

Well these are great, aren't they?

They're fantastic!

Tell you what though (indistinct).

(Louise laughs)

I know really heavy.

God, Not too....

carrying these about all day.

I know we haven't got too much further to go though.

So we're just gonna put them onto the salad border.

Yeah.

So if we finish the row.

(glass clinking)

Perfect.

Lovely.

So Louise, why are we actually putting closhes

on the soil at this time?

It's to help warm the soil up.

So we've got some early plantings

behind the scenes to bring out.

So we want to pre-warm the soil.

These are absolutely gorgeous closhes.

They're obviously not the type you might get at home.

You told me these have been restored recently.

Yeah.

So we've had them in the garden for quite some time.

They've been in the garden all the time

I've been here for about 14 years

but they were in quite a poor state of repair.

So we have a team of maintenance volunteers who do DIY work

for us and they replace quite a lot of the glass

and also rubbed down and repainted and they look amazing.

Oh they're absolutely beautiful.

But I suspect many people

at home may not have these kinds of closhes.

So what kind of thing could you use on the soil

to warm it up instead of these beautiful closhes

Yeah.

I mean, you can use more modern materials.

So people do use things like fleece,

also plastic on the soil also cut down bottles,

large plastic bottles upturned.

They can be used as closhes as well.

Lovely.

Well, hopefully you'll get some good crops

out of these in the future.

Yeah. Thank you very much.

(subtle upbeat music)

Kelly. Hi.

Hello.

What are you doing here?

You've got some you fingers on some tomatoes.

I have.

I'm just pricking out some tomatoes.

Here's some that I've already done.

We've sewn them in a seed tray

and now we're just pricking them out

into nine centimeter pots.

So they've got room to grow out.

So they're a lovely size when we come to

plant them later on.

I love the names that we've got here.

We've got White Tomensay, Vintage Wine

which is a fantastic name.

What's this one say?

Hillbilly

Hillbilly. Oh, that's a fantastic tomato.

I'd love to see some Hillbilly.

So with tomatoes, they obviously

they love a nice sunny position in the garden.

So these are gonna go along as south or west facing wall

when they're planted outside?

They're actually going to go into our tomato house.

So we're very lucky.

We've got a south-facing a tomato house,

which is part of our vinery range.

And so we'll be planting them in pots in there.

So we'll have lovely, warm sunny environment.

And how many varieties will you be growing?

So last year we grew over 60, but this year we're going

over 40 we've selected the ones that we really liked

and we've saved lots of seed.

So we've saved over 30 different varieties.

And that was through just fermenting in little jam jars

and then cleaning the seed and then packaging that up.

And what, so you are pricking out now?

Yeah.

Show me how you pick out a tomato seedling

because I know people do love growing tomatoes

in their own gardens at home.

Yeah, sure.

So we start off by sewing them in a seed tray like this

and then just to give them a bit

of a bigger root run we get nine centimeter pots.

So I'll start from the beginning.

So we just make sure all

of our compost is nice and prepped no lumps.

And then we just fill up our pot,

give it a bit of a shake.

And then we just use this

this just knocks off any of the excess soil

give it a little tamp down and then we get our dipper.

So I'm just using a pea stick.

Just give it a nice little hole right in the middle

and then we pick up our seedling just

by the seed leaves here.

Yeah So you don't want to pick it

up by the stem because you could snap that.

And if you do snap one of the leaves

that's fine because you've got another one there.

So that wouldn't cause too much damage.

Then you just firm it in

and then give it a little water and away you go.

Lovely.

(subtle upbeat music) (birds chirping)

(indistinct)

Oh wow.

It's a bit tricky to get in.

I can see that.

(all laugh)

Yes.

Wow.

Oh my goodness me.

What an amazing place.

Yeah.

(Louise laughs)

Yeah, mind your head.

(all laugh) Yes.

Louise, we're in the vinery

and it's quite interesting

how you've got the vines set up here

because this isn't how they would usually be grown all year.

Why have you got them down like this?

Okay.

So we've lowered the vines over the winter to prune them.

So you can prune them a sensible height rather

from lots of ladders.

But it's also to enable us to do winter work which,

which we are completing now

which involves scraping the bark off the vines.

In this position it allows even bud break as well

along the length of the rod.

Yeah.

You can see the buds actually are starting to grate here

along the spurs of the rods already, which is very exciting.

Yeah.

And it's interesting see to see

that actually you have been scraping the bark

and this is something that I do

on my estate at East Donyland.

I do this every year to get rid

of things like mealybug and scale insects

all the nooks and crannies where they can overwinter.

Yeah.

So is this something that they would've been doing back

in the 18 hundreds, for example?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean it's a historic method and we continue to do it.

And the, and the team have been

in busy all winter spending a long time scraping,

scraping the vines, but yeah

it's recorded in Creswell's diary.

So he was here as a gardener in the late 1870s.

And as you say, it allows access for cleaning

but also less hiding places for mealybug particularly.

And also, you know

actually looks really tactile and lovely

when you get down to that red bark.